In this chapter, Aurelian Craiutu documents key elements of Tocqueville’s political thought that are either anticipated or shared by the so-called Generation of 1820. Like Tocqueville, this cohort came of age in France during the time of the Bourbon Restoration. It included figures such as Théodore Jouffroy, Charles de Rémusat, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, and others who struggled like Tocqueville to make sense of the dawning tide of democratic equality. Their writings also reckon with problems of individualism, skepticism, and the loss of authority that all regarded as characteristic of the democratic age. Most importantly, however, Craiutu suggests in this chapter that many of Tocqueville’s insights – including his interest in the United States – may be explained by the influence of his kinsman François-René de Chateaubriand, whose earlier visit to America and subsequent writings shared much with Tocqueville’s vision.

The chapter describes the emergence of the personal novel in the first decade of the nineteenth century and its subsequent evolution thirty years later in parallel with the rise of the historical novel in France. These developments were shaped by changes in book production and readership after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, leading in the 1830s to the increasing professionalization of writing. While maintaining a narrative focus on the experience of insoluble personal conflicts, the personal novel is as much concerned with the transformations and conflicts of post-Revolutionary life as with an altered private domain. Though eclipsed by the realist novel in the middle part of the century, it exerted a prolonged influence, formal as well as thematic, on fiction in Europe and beyond for 100 years or more. The kinds of motivations to which the protagonists of the personal novel appeal, because these imply a break with received belief systems, tend to be sources of scandal. The fictions themselves border on scandal in representing the reasons for these outcomes and also show how challenging it is for those who witness such actions to evaluate or respond to them. The forms through which fiction performs this role would prove to be adaptable to the representation of quite different subsequent social changes. Thus, from the 1830s the novel displays increasing ideological militancy, notably in the work of Sand.